There’s A Company Of Heroes Movie For Some Reason

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Once, I thought there was at least some cold, profit-maximizing business precision that guided whatever awfulness-seeking missile explodes games into not-great movies, but now I’m not even sure of that anymore. I mean, don’t get me wrong: Company of Heroes is a work of absolute RTS brilliance, but it’s not exactly a household name. And yeah, much as I think my most brilliant tactical masterpieces – for instance, a nuanced little number I like to call TANKS EVERYWHERE – are worth their own movie adaptations, the game’s brand of top-down contemplaction doesn’t exactly make for the best big screen material. Then again, this one’s direct-to-DVD, so I guess that solves that. But obviously, making the leap to a new medium required Company of Heroes to take some liberties. For instance, when I say “making the leap,” I mean that literally. Across the top of a train. Like Indiana Jones. See for yourself after the break.

Unsurprisingly, Company of Heroes: The Movie of the Game of the War looks preposterously overblown and cliched. Also, if it can maintain the level of dramatic action movie leaping featured in this trailer throughout the whole film, well, it’ll certainly be… something.

The plot, meanwhile, focuses on evil Nazi science and the only company of soldiers – nay, heroes – who can Get The Job Done. Observe, courtesy of IGN:

“During the last major German offensive of World War II, a company of American soldiers is lost behind enemy lines during the Battle of the Bulge and they make a horrific discovery – Hitler has a super bomb in development. The soldiers soon learn about a secret allied mission to retrieve a defecting German scientist in charge of a secret weapons program. Faced with impossible odds, the company and an escaping POW go on a daring raid into the heart of Nazi Germany in pursuit of the scientist.”

It’s actually got some fairly serious starpower going for it, though – or at least, starpower in the realm of war movies. Tom Sizemore of Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down’s starring, and Neal McDonough from Band of Brothers is also on board. If nothing else, I doubt the ensuing mishmash of so-bad-it’s-good-ness will be boring. At least, I really, really hope not.

So yeah, Company of Heroes is getting a movie. One that’s significantly more existent than those of World of Warcraft, Mass Effect, Wolfenstein, and many, many others, no less. What a world, etc.

Doubt it, those are RAF wings on his jacket. He’ll probably be depicted slamming some unfortunate Luftwaffe pilots head into the canopy of his Spitfire Mk. XIV because “‘e was sayin’ bad things ’bout the King an’ the royal family.”

Even the trailer fails to make the action seem any good. Doesn’t exactly make me look forward to the actual movie.
Also: it’s been a while since I played CoH but was there even any story in it apart from “you are fighting this battle of WW2”?

Is it too offensive to make a game where you play on the nazi side? Not that I’m interested, just realized that nobody has made an FPS game where you play as nazis. We got a Vietnam war game where you play as the other side, but no nazis. Maybe it’s for the better.

I reckon its possible this film already existed as a cheap, straight-to-DVD film with a different title, but THQ paid the producers to change the title so they could use it for COH 2 marketing. Which would mean its basically product placement.

This is left over from Danny Bilson’s big ‘transmedia’ deal with ‘Syfy’ (and further proof that he wasn’t really interested in making video games so much as developing properties he could pitch as films and retain creative control over), which brought us that other cinematic masterpiece ‘Red Faction: Origins.’

Every single clip comes from an existing movie, some from war films, some from films of comics. Am I to assume I have missed something, as I cannot believe that you all, nor the author cannot see this.

Actually that seems to be a T-34 with a custom turret as far as I can tell. I don’ t know if the Germans used a turret like that but if I recall correctly they were known to modify and use captured enemy tanks…

They could be going for parodying the terrible war films of the 60s/’70s, where they used post-war tanks mocked up to look ever so slightly like Shermans, but not nearly enough that you couldn’t tell it was an M60, and the Germans uniformly used American half-tracks with swastikas painted on. (Battle of the Bulge, Raid on Rommel)

I can’t believe no-one’s thought of making a WW2 film before now. You’d think there would be loads of them, but luckily we now have this to fill the niche. You never know, it might even spawn a whole genre of generic copycat films.

And here I thought I was the only one in the world who’d suffered through the PS1-rendered CGI ‘magic’ of the Doomtrooper. Sci-Fi originals at 2.a.m on a Monday morning were the best, most awful things.

Hollywood’s usual M.O. is: Hey, we have a nice warmovie/historical/sci-fi/paranormal script. Do we have movie rights to any IP roughly in the same genre so we can shoehorn it in and wash our hands if the movie bombs?

Is there a way that we can know for sure that this movie is anyway related to THQ and CoH the game in anything other than the name? Maybe they just picked the same name randomly?

I am in the mode for WW2 movies these days so I suppose I wouldn’t mind yet another one, but why oh why does it have to involve some silly what-if Hollywood garbage. Why not just tell one of the bizzilion real life stories…..something like this gem: